goILOILO.com
Travels and personal perspectives on Iloilo and Panay Island
Our Philippine House Project: Construction Quality – Philippines
Tags: Concrete, Construction Quality, Philippine Concrete, Philippine Retirement, ponke
A ponke in action
Building our house in the Philippines. Ensuring concrete quality. This photos shows the workers adding material to the cement mixer using a “ponke”. The ponke is a wooden box with handles. The inside dimensions of the ponke are 40cm x 40cm x 40cm. The ponke is sized to hold one sack of cement. I asked that the ponkes be built and used as a means of controlling the concrete mixture. After research, we decided on a mixture of one part cement, two parts sand and three parts gravel – a 1-2-3 mix. The use of the ponkes makes it easy to get the mixture right. Ponkes are rarely used in the Philippines now, but formerly were the norm . Now materials are more commonly measured using empty cement sacks refilled with sand or gravel. I wanted the ponkes and my ever patient crew accommodated another whim of the kano.
Our quest for construction quality led us to buy a cement mixer, an internal concrete vibrator and to used washed screened gravel for the columns and beams rather than ordinary unscreened gravel. We paid P700 per cubic meter for the screened gravel versus P420 for regular gravel. More on the mixer and vibrator at http://goiloilo.com/building-our-house-getting-started/
One of the crucial advantages of being you own contractor is that YOU have some control the quality and quantity of concrete and reinforcing bar. If you don’t think this is important, study the photos of the Haiti earthquake. While there was widespread destruction, many building survived with little or no damage.
Our 1-2-3 mix is almost considered to be an extravagance. The house you buy already built probably won’t have such strong concrete. 1-3-5 is in common use. I have seen deliveries of substandard reinforcing bar. A poorly built house may be built with a “class B” or “class C” concrete mix and not enough rebar. You’ll never know what’s in your house unless you build it yourself. It might never matter, but here’s a photo of the church in nearby Oton, Iloilo which was destroyed in the 1948 Panay Island earthquake.
Magnificent Oton Church, destroyed by 1948 earthquake. About 8KM from our building site.
The plan of our house was designed by a structural engineer. We’re trying to be quite strict in following the plans. We see quite a bit of good engineering in the plans as we build. Lots of reinforcing steel is used in critical areas, but much less in columns not carrying much load. Sometimes good Filipino builders use traditional rules of thumb not based on engineering basics. This can mean too much steel in places which really don’t need it and not enough in places that do.
At least in the provinces, the ambition to have quality concrete for your project can lead to frustration. My crew are hard workers, but accustomed to their ways of concrete construction. The local gravel contains so much sand that the mix probably ends up being 1-3-2 (one cement, three sand and two gravel). The workers like this sandy gravel because it’s easy to work with, flows easily into forms. Using 3/4′ gravel makes stronger concrete, but my workers hate it. Even more importantly, trying to keep Philippine workers from adding too much water to concrete is a legendary problem. They like to make soupy concrete because it flows easily and does not set-up quickly, it remains “workable” for a much longer time than proper concrete. I had read that some on-site supervising engineers have been so frustrated with this problem that they just disappeared from the project site. I now understand their problem. I have pushed so hard that it has caused real friction with my crew. In my mind I know that when the forms are removed the columns and beams look great, impressively solid, the strength of good concrete may have been seriously compromised by my workers ingrained habits.
On a less technical note, I have to observe that this quest for perfection in construction is an obsession shared by many old foreigners building in the Philippines. There is something a bit irrational about it. They spend too much money on the dream home of their autumn years — their last big enterprise. Often they don’t end up living in the house for very long. You’ll see lots of them for sale on the Internet.
Some build and find they don’t like living in the Philippines. Most foreigners are retired and old. Many become ill and return to their home countries. The houses they are building really don’t belong to them, as foreigners can’t own property in the Philippines. The foreigner is dependent on the goodwill of the wife and her family. This does not always work out. The foreigner wants a building which will last for generations but it’s likely his residence will not be for long.
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Posted by GOIloilo on 01.24.10 7:15AM under Our House Project
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